dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Citizens Action Network

29 March 2013 ·

The Homeland Security Act

Legislation Predicated on the "Official" Story of the 9/11/01 Attack

Like us? www.facebook.com/Citizens.Action.Network

The Homeland Security Act (HSA) was pushed through Congress in the months following 9/11, ostensibly to "organize a government that is fractured, divided and under-prepared to handle the all-important task of defending our great nation from terrorist attack."

The 484-page Act prescribed the biggest change in the federal government in over 50 years. Its passage, on November 25, 2002, consolidated more than 20 existing federal agencies into a single Homeland Security Department, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Not since President Truman created the Department of Defense in 1947 has the federal government undergone such dramatic restructuring.

Attack on Civil Liberties

The purported aim of this consolidation was to detect and eliminate emerging terrorist threats by removing information firewalls between government agencies, and centralizing the unprecedented flood of surveillance data made possible by the USA PATRIOT Act.

However, civil liberties groups have objected strongly to the Homeland Security Act from the start, contending that it is characterized by three disturbing trends: reduced privacy, increased government secrecy and power and strengthened government protection of special interests. Allen Weinstein, president of the Center for Democracy in Washington, DC, has called it a "law of unintended consequences."

The Total Information Awareness Office has been the most controversial of the Act's provisions. A Pentagon (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) project legalized by the Homeland Security Act, TIA was given a startup budget of $200 million, and a mandate to achieve a state of "Total Information Awareness." Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to Congress about his central role in the Iran Contra affair, was placed in charge of the IAO.

Poindexter had plans to create 300 million computer dossiers, a file for every American, which would serve as repositories for data "mined" from both public and private sources, including detailed information on transactions, finances, education, medical history, travel, personal communications, and public records from every branch of government, including the CIA and FBI. Programs were also underway to employ facial recognition and "gait recognition" technologies.